The Streisand effect

Until not that long ago, I would express this idea using the Romanian saying: "De ce te temi, de aceea şi dai", which means approximately "You bump into that what you try to avoid" (I'll probably try to come up with a better version later).

I never knew there was another name for this too - the Streisand effect.

What is it about? The essence of this phenomenon is that one's attempt to hide or censor something will result in that 'something' becoming extremely popular, an effect opposite to what the censor had in mind. Origin:

The name Streisand effect comes from an incident in which Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for $50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Adelman was photographing beachfront property as a way to document coastal erosion. The picture of Streisand's house that previously carried almost no interest to anyone suddenly spread all over the Internet.

This is becoming very common nowadays, since the Internet is omnipresent, and it can be used to spread information across the globe at a very low cost, in a very short time.

The latest occurence of this effect relates to the discovery and publishing of the HD-DVD processing key. You should check out the comments on Slashdot, I haven't had such a good laugh for quite some time; some of the comments are really funny, they point out how hi-tech humour can be, how inventive(see IPv6 address example) and cooperative the community is.

Finally, here is a fragment of Python code; what it prints on the screen is left as an exercise for the reader.
[code]
s = "CDZRHERNTPHPQJWETXEQJGGPVKQ"
n = 0
for c in s:
n *= 26
n += ord(c) - 65
print ("0%x") % n
[/code]